PEMBROKE – Some may call it a long string of luck, or simply chalk it up to fate.

But Kevin Duperre attributes being here to spend Father’s Day with his wife and children to a string of people who collectively saved his life – from the insightful coworker who called for help, to the paramedics who worked on him well after his heart stopped and the nurses and doctors who kept him alive.

“They could have easily called it a day, and they didn’t,” Duperre, 45, said, sitting alongside his wife Kristen in their Pembroke backyard. “We think of all the what-ifs. It’s overwhelming.”

Dubbed by doctors “the miracle of modern medicine,” Duperre on Nov. 1 suffered a massive heart attack caused by undetected heart disease. The attack left Duperre legally blind, but it would have proven fatal were it not for unrelated players who were in the right place at the right time.

So while Father’s Day is a time to thank dads for all they do, Duperre is thanking the people who made it possible for him to spend the day with his family.

“They’re very selfless people, and none want to take credit,” Duperre said, holding back tears. “There are so many people to thank, and it’s not just us who have gone through this.”

“They are amazing people who all did their jobs so well,” Kristen added. “What they do for a living, until you go through it, you can never imagine it.”

A Dunkin’ Brands executive, Duperre was feeling off when he got to the company’s Braintree facility around 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 1. Company trainer Suzanne Alpert happened to have a 7 a.m. session, and noticed Duperre trying to catch his breath when she arrived unusually early.

“She said, ‘Kevin, do you think you’re having a heart attack?’” Duperre recalled. “I, being a typical guy, wrote it off as just not feeling well.”

Alpert called 911, and Duperre went into cardiac arrest as Fallon Ambulance paramedics James Puljanowski and Bryan Cleary arrived. They had spent 40 minutes working to get a pulse by the time they got Duperre to South Shore Hospital.

“(Paramedics) told us his heart beat would come back for a second, so they thought they could get it back and didn’t give up,” Kristen said.

Instead of going forward with a 7 a.m. shift change, staff at South Shore Hospital mobilized upon hearing a 44-year-old man in cardiac arrest was coming in.

Cardiologist Joseph Jiang tried to open Duperre’s blocked blood vessels before transferring him to Tufts Medical Center in Boston.

Page 2 of 2 - Duperre went into cardiac arrest again at Tufts, but Dr. Navin Kapur, an interventional cardiologist from Hanover, and his team kept him alive using state-of-the-art technology. Duperre spent 19 days in critical care, much of that unconscious.

Kapur said out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is a “devastating presentation,” with a survival rate of about 10 percent. Those who do survive, Kapur said, received CPR immediately.

“There’s really minutes or even seconds that make a difference for getting the heart pumping again, and those attempts were critical to saving this father’s life,” Kapur said.

“There are many moving parts to Kevin’s story, but the nuts-and-bolts work of the paramedics make them the ultimate angels here.”

Kapur said he told Duperre’s story at the 2013 American Heart Association conference to demonstrate the important of early resuscitation.

While friends, family, coworkers and neighbors provided support, Kristen said doctors and nurses kept her informed.

“We never gave up, ever, and every doctor gave us pieces of hope,” Kristen said. “They said, ‘He’s very, very sick, but we’re doing everything we can.’”

Because Duperre’s attack was coupled with heart failure, or cardiogenic shock, Kapur said his chances of dying were much higher. He said South Shore Hospital staff did a “phenomenal job” stabilizing Duperre and recognizing the complexity of his case.

“Looking at a picture of Kevin’s heart, the main pumping chambers were not pumping at all,” he said. “He beat all the odds by leaving without any evidence of heart failure.”

Duperre will soon attend the Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton. He says he is learning to enjoy his children’s sports games and chorus concerts in a different way, and the family is just happy to have dad.

“When you go through something like this, you find out how strong your family is,” he said.